East London tech founder wants to change the food supply chain

He grew up bouncing on his shopkeeper father’s knee behind the counter, dreamt of becoming an inventor and studied to be a banker.

Somehow Anx Patel has managed to combine all three skills into startup GoKart as CEO.

The app enables restaurants to order ingredients at the click of a button, using group buying power to get them at the same prices large chains enjoy.

The 39-year-old built the platform as a way of helping cash-strapped independents fight rising costs and said on average customers saved 20% with sales growing by 30% each month.

It charges fees for use of the platform and uses an algorithm to find the best suppliers for customers, who get produce delivered to their door the next day.

“Ingredients are the third biggest cost for restaurants after rent and rates and hiring and keeping staff,” said the tech founder.

“Because of Brexit and climate change food prices are just rocketing.

“Seafood has gone up 23% over the last 12 months, which is a huge concern for restaurants.”

Based between Angel and Old Street, GoKart landed a place on the first Just Eat food tech accelerator programme in 2016 and attracted £530,000 funding from investors including the founder and CEO of restaurant chain Toss’d and former chairs of Barclays, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

The smell of success is in the air, as it has just closed its third £500,000 funding round, aimed at doubling its team of nine to cope with a rapid growth which has seen it grow from three clients to 155 in a year.

But Anx admits it has been a long hard slog to get here.

He first learned the struggles of running your own food orientated business as a child.

“I was basically born in a shop and sitting on my dad’s need by the age of three months selling stamps with him,” said the Beckenham resident.

“Dad hoped I’d go off and be a banker so I went off and got a maths degree at UCL, came out and broke his heart by buying a bucket of a store with flickering yellow lights that wasn’t making any money.

“But two years in, it all fell into place and started growing 20% a month and the reason was I was hyper-local.

“I sold it after nine years just before the credit crunch, got married, had kids and then my wife kind of kicked me out to get a job so I went and worked for Nisa Local heading up the team that built their tills system.

“That was the start of a Eureka moment.”

He was amazed by a scanning gun used by staff to order stock and the contrast between the “archaic” faxes, emails and meetings he had to have with suppliers when he was a shopkeeper.

“I thought it would be great if we could use the tech in our pockets, smartphones, to allow a shopkeeper to order from any suppliers,” said Anx.

“So I quit my job and started building it and thought I would be Mark Zuckerberg in two months but that didn’t happen.”

Between 2014 and 2017 he invested £60,000 of savings into trying to make the business work.

“The initial idea was to replicate the scanning on a smartphone app to make the technology more accessible to small shops,” said Anx.

But it was when he met a restaurant supplier by chance that he saw there might be better opportunities in restaurants.

“I realised chefs order less and often and they order at the end of service when they know what they need for the next day,” he said.

“They normally pick up the phone at 1am and leave an message saying: ‘Hey it’s me I need tomatoes,’ and then hang up.

“The supplier on the other end is left wondering who it was and what they actually needed.

“With GoKart they could just tap what they want in the app and an email will be sent in with the right customer details and product codes and all that ambiguity goes away.

“I learned you really need to get out there and identify what the problems are and not just deal the same problem or in the same way as everybody else and then build a solution that meets that problem.”

He applied for the Just Eat accelerator with only hours to spare, was chosen from 240 businesses and the three-month programme helped set him on the right path.

“The thing that came out of that was to stay focused – if you chase two rabbits they will both go away,” said Anx. “They told us the restaurant supply was a known problem and to focus on that.

“So I came out of that accelerator thinking I’ll be Mark Zuckerberg again and again it just didn’t work.

“So I went out and talk to our suppliers again and asked, ‘Do you want to save money on your costs or do you want more business?’

“They said they wanted more business.

“So we recruited three restaurants in September last year, 30 in November and since then we have just been growing and growing and now we have 155.”

Anx has his sights set on making the business worth £480,000 in the next five years and eventually “world domination”.

“That’s a scary goal but I can see it being achieved. We know the problem exists in the States and Australia,” said the father-of-two.

“We know we have a great solution to one of the problems that suppliers have – over-reliance on the big chains, ones like Jamie’s and Byron that have been shutting sites down.

“Whereas independents are actually doing quite well and opening second or third sites.

“What we do works and we’re just multiplying that to try and help as many businesses as we can.”

When a restaurant signs up to GoKart the company looks at the ingredients it is buying and uses an algorithm to match them to its portfolio suppliers which includes London independents right up to some of the UK’s biggest meat and seafood companies.

“We look at three things when choosing suppliers to work with – price, quality and customer service.

“The advantage of the big guys is they have a national reach while the independents give more control if someone is looking for something particular like organic or locally sourced produce.

“We are also seeing a huge trend in restaurants moving away from plastics and wanting suppliers with biodegradable or compostable packaging or reusable crates.

Customers also pay for their goods on delivery through the app or 30 days later and the platform is now on version 24 with more changes to come over the next year.

“The first 12 versions were built by me,” said Anx. “I taught myself to code and built it. It was a huge challenge but I found it quite logical and just chipped away every day.

“I don’t really feel a big sense of achievement now it’s out there though because any mountain you climb just sets you up for a bigger mountain .

“I don’t think I will get a sense of achievement until we have an IPO or are listed on the stock exchange.”

Looking back he said his biggest challenge with GoKart, which is on track to be in profit next year, has been “persistence”.

“When you are doing something new there’s going to be a huge block of people in the industry are happy with the status quo or who don’t see the coming dangerous,” said Anx.

“So the biggest challenge was keeping on believing in what I wanted to do but also mixing that in with experimentation pivoting and changing things until I found what works.

“I think absolutely I have done that now and things are falling into place but in any business there are huge amounts of challenges constantly so it’s not over yet.

“My wife and kids are super supportive – wearing hand-me-down clothes, not going on proper holidays and putting up with me being stuck in the garage for three years.

“It is really hard to keep that work-life balance and I have pictures of my kids in my arms while I was developing the app, tapping away a keyboard.”

Sounds like he is following in his late father’s footsteps even more closely than he realised.